In Recovery...

SQL Connections is in less than two months now and our pre-con and post-con workshops are filling up fast – checkout my previous blog post here for the full list of what we’re presenting. Now we’ve finalized our TechEd US sessions with Microsoft and can let you all know that we’re going to be there […]

Here’s a question that came in – what changed in SQL Server 2005 that allows concurrent log and full backups? First a little background, in case you didn’t know about the change in behavior. In SQL Server 2000, a concurrent log backup with either a full or diff backup (I’ll just say ‘full’ from now […]

A few short notes this morning regarding the blogs and other stuff. We had a big outage over the weekend, which rather embarrassingly manifested itself as ‘out-of-disk-space’ errors for anyone trying to get to any of our blogs. As you all know we preach about pro-active monitoring of data and log file space, so this […]

Phew – last week Kimberly and I spent 3 days teaching the ins-and-outs of SQL Server 2008 for DBAs/IT-Pros to about 130 Microsoft SQL Server experts and MVPs (like Kalen Delaney, Adam Machanic and Ron Talmage). This was the (95% complete) Beta delivery of a course we’ve been developing for the last six months for Microsoft […]

Last year I posted on my old blog about the active SQL Server team blogs. I just happened to post on February 14th and so in every class Kimberly teaches, she makes fun of how romantic I was to post that on Valentine's Day. So what better thing to post this year than an update […]

Almost a year ago to the day I asked a question on my old blog – how long does *your* CHECKDB take to run? Well, I had a bunch of replies but I never got around to posting the results. I was reminded of this recently so threw together some graphs of the results. I've […]

After many reminders (thanks Adam Machanic!) I’ve added Conor and Simon to the two aggregated feeds over all the SQLskills.com blogs. There are two feeds: SQL Server 2008 Category Posts Provides previous 30 day’s posts http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?Age=30+days+ago&_id=mhCQs_B13BGv3jGgjtzu1g&_render=rss All posts Provides previous 20 day’s posts http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?Age=20+days+ago&_id=vv9PBOp13BGAc67kLO2fWQ&_render=rss The amount of content is really growing as Simon and Conor […]

This post is based on one from my old MSDN blog but the topic has come up a few times in recent days so I want to revamp it and re-post. There are two things that confuse people about mirrored backups – can you mix-n-match backup devices from the mirrors, and what exactly do the […]

The second post in my series on FILESTREAM (see here) deals with how to enable FILESTREAM through T-SQL and using SSMS. You can’t just create FILESTREAM data – you have to specifically enable it at the instance level and then possibly restart the instance or host computer. The reason for this is that there’s a […]

Here’s an issue that I thought was a one-off but it just popped up again over the weekend so I want to publicize it. DBA runs a DBCC CHECKDB and gets output like the following: Wow! Looks like something’s seriously wrong with that database. Until you find that this happens on *all* the databases on […]

Now we’re back at home and working very strange hours as we deal with jet-lag. The flight back from Beijing to Vancouver was a great flight but with weird seats in business class – individual pods instead of actual seats. Nice to be able do lie down flat but not very wide – not the […]